Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the generous help of many people. We cannot begin to name everyone who has provided us with assistance, but the following people especially merit our thanks. (Of course, any mistakes in the book are solely the authors' responsibility.) We are grateful to

Susan Hanis, who at one time or another mentored each author in performance tuning and analysis. We appreciate all that she has taught us about performance over the years , and we particularly recognize her contributions of networking and web site expertise to this project.

Harvey Gunther, for his continuing quest to identify the best practices for developing Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications and his willingness to educate and share his knowledge.

Carolyn Norton, for her expertise, attention to detail, and encouragement throughout this process. We thank her especially for helping us out with some of the trickier network calculations we attempted.

Kyle Brown, for his expertise, advice, encouragement, and assistance throughout this process.

Geoff Hambrick, for his expert advice in the area of best practices.

Ken McCauley and Tom Kristek, for their encouragement and understanding throughout the writing of this book.

Gennaro Cuomo, for his support and expertise, and also for providing some performance data for our examples.

Leo Cai, for his assistance in creating the LoadRunner scripts and reviewing Chapters 7 and 8.

Stephan Asboeck, for his assistance in creating the SilkPerformer script and reviewing Chapters 7 and 8.

Dave Peterson for helping us through the publication process.

The five technical reviewers, Thomas Alcott, Kyle Brown, Susan Hanis, Scott Rich, and Paul Tyma, for valuable suggestions that dramatically improved the quality and accuracy of the book.

Also, we would like to thank Mary O'Brien, Amy Fleischer, Mary Cotillo, Alicia Carey, as well as the rest of the publication team at Addison-Wesley for their efforts in making this book possible. We would especially like to thank Nick Murray, our copy editor, and Robin Kibby, our illustrator, for their terrific work.

We recognize all our colleagues in the IBM WebSphere development and enablement teams for making high-performance J2EE applications a reality. Finally, we thank our families for their support and sacrifices during this endeavor.